7 Unsung and Essential BuddyPress Community Management Plugins

These plugins may not receive a lot of press, but they come in very handy when working with your community. Some of them are new this week and others have been around awhile, working quietly in the background to provide solutions for common problems. They may not be the most flashy or exciting plugins, but many of them are so useful that you might be stumped for days trying to figure out how to do these things on your own. We have a lot of new users to BuddyPress lately, so if you’re looking for a list of solid plugins that will make BuddyPress community plumbing a breeze, then bookmark this reference for the future.

BP Edit Group Slug

This plugin adds extra tabs to Create and Edit methods to allow manual setting and editing of a BuddyPress Group slug. You can’t imagine how useful this is until you’ve wanted to do this and scratched your head wondering how. BP Edit Group Slug adds this cleanly to your BuddyPress theme as if it were already built into the core.
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BuddyPress Forums – Move Topic (Planned: Split and Merge Topic)

Provides a drop-down on Forum Topic page for Group Admins / Moderators to move topic thread to another public, private, or hidden forum. To avoid user confusion, topic author gets email alert with helpful link to the relocated topic.
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BuddyPress Group Email

This is one of the most useful BuddyPress plugins for groups. It allows the group admin to send an email to all of the group members through the front-end of BuddyPress by simply typing their message and clicking send. The message is sent to the user’s email address, which ensures that messages are received, even if a user’s notifications are turned off.
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BuddyPress Terms of Service

Want to make sure your users agree to your terms before clicking “register”? Easily add and edit your own terms of service with this plugin. It also helps to cut down on splog creation.
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Site Wide Text Change

This comes in handy when you want to change all instances of a word on your site to something else. For example, if you’re building a highly customized CMS and you want to replace all instances of ‘WordPress’ with ‘Company Communications’ then this tool will help you to do that in a matter of a couple seconds. You won’t need to hack any core files whatsoever.
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BuddyPress Announce Group

This plugin allows you to change any BuddyPress group into an announce-only group, where only admins and moderators can post. Members can read all the content but they cannot add anything. The Forum has been renamed to ‘Announcements’.
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BuddyPress Restrict Group Creation

This is probably one of my favorite BuddyPress plugins, because it does something that people are always asking for and that I think ought to be added to the core. It allows you to restrict creating groups and group settings to certain WP Capabilities, as well as define a group admin and mod that will be auto-assigned all new groups created.
» Download Plugin

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